Yet more Rewired State

A couple of hours this afternoon at the mini-Googleplex in Victoria, watching
the teenagers of Young Rewired State
present their hacks. It was an impressive show, not just for the ideas, all of
which were good ones, or for the clarity and self-confidence with which they
were presented, but because of the focus on doing something about it, on
creating something better in part to make the point that what there is is not
good enough.

A quick and very unofficial/inexact roll call of the projects is below. They
show the strengths of this approach, but also some of its limitations, which I
also felt (but expressed very badly) in my reflections on Rewired
State for grown ups. The challenge for government is to find a way of having
the conversations which build on the strengths and gets us all past the
limitations.

The big strength is that this is easy. Not in the sense that anybody at all
could wander in off the street and do it or that it doesn’t take a lot of
determined hard work, but that people with the right skills and the right
attitude find it easy to see things which are worth fixing and easy to make
progress on turning ideas into solutions (subject to being able to get the data
they need, but that’s another story).

That in turn means that this is yet another area where the web makes abundant
what was once scarce. Its being abundant, it makes sense to apply approaches
based on abundance: let there be many ideas, let them be developed not because
we know they are right (whatever that means) but because some will falter and
fade away, while others will grow, merge and acquire further energy and
impetus. We don’t have to play the game of picking the winners in advance and
then keeping our fingers crossed as months and years go by.

Having said that, the game of picking winners is irresistible. These were
the contenders (listed in order of appearance as I live tweeted them):

Stop underage people getting age restricted goods. Not a winner for the teen
audience, but right approach -
reporting only pass/fail of key data rather than exposing personal
data.

Four prizes were
awarded:

What google might buy prize: TFHell

I wish I'd thought of that prize: Work for peanuts

Most likely to antagonise CIO council prize: How's my train running

Overall best in show award: Schoolroutr 2.0 beta

The Public Strategist awards overlap with those, but there are only two of
them:

The Short Term Prize for the service which most obviously
ought to exist, for which there is no good reason that it does not exist and
which now just needs to happen goes to TFHell. My personal
enthusiasm for this undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that London
buses are my primary means of transport, but there is more to it than that. The
idea was well thought through, some attention had been given to how people might
actually want to use it, the problem is a simple one and the solution clear – if
only TfL would open up the data.

The Long Term Prize for the service which has no obvious need to exist, but
which captures an opportunity to do something radical, simple, interesting and
subversive goes to Blog-o-tics. This is, in effect, a way of
providing automated feedback to the political process, expressed in very simple
but powerful visual terms. I don’t have the slightest idea whether this would
work, or would have any effect if it did – but that’s precisely the reason it
was one of the more interesting ideas on display.

So where do we go from here? I see three important elements of the way
forward.

The first is to avoid the groundhog day problem. Starting from scratch hack
days are powerful and inspirational. They shouldn’t stop happening. But we don’t
want to carry on just starting at the beginning each time. Looking at the set
of projects here and the original Rewired State, there are some clear clusters
of related thinking and development. Are there ways of encouraging groups to
coalesce, of supporting and encouraging them to move their ideas one or two
stages on – and perhaps to return in a few weeks or months to present the next
iteration (or, more likely, the next iteration but seventeen). This feels a bit
like getting a rocket into orbit: a powerful first stage will get you off the
ground, but a second and even third stage will be needed to reach orbit –
without that, the rocket just falls back to earth with the effort wasted.

The second – for which doing the first would create some space and
opportunity – would be to bring in users and customers more explicitly. These
projects can get off to a great start using their originators as their own use
case, but they won’t become sustainable on that basis. Government has painfully
learned – or, rather, is painfully learning – that starting off with the
assumption that you know what is best for people doesn’t deliver the greatest
results. I am not quite sure where the tipping point comes between
creator-evangelists and customer-centred design, but I am sure it has to come
somewhere.

The third and by far the hardest is to apply some of the same approaches and
subversive challenges beyond the surface layer of government services. The very
last idea presented today began to get into that (though was reported on
indirectly, as the person working on it had had to leave early). Essentially it
was about finding a better way of demonstrating that you are old enough to get a
service with an age restriction. The important bit, if I understood it right,
is that they had spotted that what is needed is a binary answer to the question
(“based on the information we hold, this person is indeed over 18”) as opposed
to splurge of personal data (“here is everything we know about the person, from
which feel free to pick the bits you need and root round all the rest”).

None of that, though, should detract from what was achieved at Young Rewired
State. There are lots of smart people desperate to do smart things. The rest
of us have a huge interest in finding ways of letting them.

Thanks for your support! As soon as we've got the data we plan on a public launch for all major mobile platforms, as well as releasing components for iGoogle and popular social networks. Oh and we've got a nice Twitter experiment lined up too - as close to SMS as we can afford right now.

Once we've found a better (well, more appropriate) name we plan on contacting a few people from the political world and TfL itself. Any direction (from anyone reading this) would be greatly appreciated - contact us here: